Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump is facing low approval ratings, a weakening economy, and a prolonged conflict in Iran, but he seems focused on the Reflecting Pool and renovating the White House.

Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue.

In the new film I Want Your Sex, characters are action figures in a staging of generational war.
On one side is Gen Z, its members portrayed as anxious little prudes. Twenty-three-year-old Elliot is bumbling and directionless. His high-achieving girlfriend is far more interested in studying than she is in him. (When he tries to initiate intimacy, she accuses him of “constantly draining my qi energy.

“I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew.

Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. Vendors sold Fauci votive candles and bobbleheads.